Campo della Maddalena Site Features

Twelve Ionic columns, one for each apostle, support the church's dome inside, while four Ionic half-columns carry the tympanum and attic on the exterior -- Temanza's clearest borrowing from the Pantheon's own portico. The lunette above the portal carries an allegorical relief of Solomonic and Divine Wisdom, and inside, to the right of the entrance, hangs a Last Supper painted by Giandomenico Tiepolo.

Across the square, the asymmetrical Palazzo Magno keeps its Gothic portal largely intact, carved with a relief of St. Magno of Oderzo -- the bishop traditionally credited with founding several of Venice's earliest churches -- accompanied by two angels rendered in a lively, almost dancing pose.

A wellhead from the early 16th century still stands at the center of the raised campo, and the surrounding houses keep their traditional tall Venetian chimneys and barbacani brackets -- small, everyday architectural details that reward a slow look around the square.

The campo lies just north of the Strada Nova in Cannaregio, a few steps off the constant pedestrian traffic between the railway station and the Rialto, and reached through a short calle that gives no sign of what is behind it.

It is not really a square so much as a widening. The space is small, raised slightly above the surrounding pavement, and closed on all sides by ordinary houses -- with the result that the circular church and the Gothic palace facing each other across it are much closer together than either was designed for.

That tightness is what makes the place work. Temanza's rotunda was modelled on the Pantheon, a building that stands in a wide Roman piazza; here the same idea is compressed into a Venetian courtyard, and it can only be seen from twenty metres away at most.

The Rio della Maddalena runs alongside, and the calli behind lead quickly into a quiet residential pocket of Cannaregio that almost no one on the Strada Nova ever turns into.